Main menu

Tag Archives: marketing budget

Digital marketing changes quickly. We’ve known that forever. But lately, it’s changing even more quickly. Our current social media channels are evolving everyday. New competitors are rising through the wood works even faster, but what does that mean? What should our brands care about? What should we takeaway from 2015?

There are five areas, which will impact brands the most. They are based upon the content we create, the ways we disseminate the content, how we amplify it, and the money we are able to put towards it.

CONTENT IS THE WAY

Without great content, not much else matters. The content our brands create must be agnostic of channel and device. It needs to be able to travel the web when being shared, promoted, and shared again. People need to be able to interact with the piece of content on whatever channel they choose and prefer.

SOCIAL IS A BEHAVIOR

Many consider social media a channel, but social has become a behavior. It’s a way of living. We, as consumers, consume content in an instant. We purchase through mobile while we are commuting. We swipe left before we have a chance to engage because we make our decisions in an instant. In turn brands need to be able to grab our attention faster, and keep it before we swipe away. We share when it’s entertaining or informative. We care about what’s shared, because it’s a perception of our personal brand. We wouldn’t share something that’s uncool or boring. As brands, we need to be in tune to these behaviors.

AMPLIFYING ACROSS WEB IS A MUST

Brand have to realize that it’s valuable and important to promote across the web today. Gone are the days of focusing on channel by channel, because as discussed content needs to live everywhere. When a consumer shares a video from YouTube, it can go from Facebook to Twitter to email to Apple TV. Brands must optimize and promote across the web and across devices.

VIDEO IS CLUTCH

With streaming video, video that disappears in seconds or hours, and Facebook profile pictures being able to be videos instead of just pictures, video is not just a choice. First it was visual, now it’s more than that. Consumers want to capture stories and experience things. It’s not about a product, it’s about the experience around it. It’s the brand story and what it stands for. And video is one way a brand can help do that.

HAVE A BUDGET

And the most important. Ensure your marketing team has a budget they can actually work with. Unfortunately, some brands give their marketing teams a little budget as an afterthought. This is no longer enough in order to grow awareness and engagement from a brand marketing standpoint. Without this, your content, your plans, won’t be able to reach their true potential. As you put together your 2016 plans, and you think where you want your brand to be, determine the amount of budget you’ll need to get there, and put an extra amount in (trust me, you’ll end up using it).

Social media is far from how it was when consumers and brands started. Facebook was only for college students, then unleashed its platform for all consumers. Now brands and publishers are the norm, but consumers still hold the power when it comes to what they want to consume or avoid.

The problem for brands, especially small business and startups, it reaching your audience when so many social media are saturated with other businesses trying to do the same thing.

Not-so-fun fact: The reach for organic posts on Facebook is next to nothing. Dropping from 10% to around 2% in the last year, brands are struggling for cutting through the noisy clutter of our Facebook news feeds.

So what can startups do? Here are some tips for balancing out the lack of engagement on one of the largest social media sites with the other channels in your social toolbox.

Focus on your social assets.

Use social channels where your message isn’t hidden due to some annoying algorithm.

If you have a tumblr blog or site, with a built-in community — your post will appear to those who follow (and/or are searching for your content) you every time you post. It is easy to be found and engaged with as long as you are putting out fun, fresh, visual content on a regular basis. It’s that simple.

Focus on twitter where your content can be found easily through hashtags. Yes the life of a tweet is minimal, but it doesn’t mean you can’t tweet out again later with similar messaging for your content to be seen by your followers/audience.

For fashion brands especially, visual channels like Instagram and Pinterest are where the money is at. Again hashtags allow Instagram to be fruitful for engagement. Pinterest with its ability to provide amazing referral traffic to blogs and retail sites is worth the time commitment.

Try some of the “newer” channels like Vine to tap into creative efforts, and in turn distribute on your main channels like Twitter where it can be watched in stream. It’s also great for rich posts, and easily shareable for the fashion and style audience.

Learn more on how to focus on your budget, with my full post on Startup Fashion.

So if you’re anything like me, you may have a lofty list of things to achieve for 2014; perhaps forgetting how much time they’ll actually take. So bring yourself down to Earth for a minute, and think realistically. Instead of having 20 goals, consider 5 to 7 that you can span out within the first 6 months. Then in the second half of the year you can see what worked, what didn’t, and revise, optimize, and achieve more than you originally planned.

Where to start? Consider these tips while crafting your marketing and business goals.

1. Ensure all your goals are measurable – If you can’t measure it through things like engagement, referral traffic, etc – then you won’t know if it worked and/or what went wrong during your test phase.

2. Review your previous goals from 2013 – This is a great place to start, because it allows you to learn from previous successes and mistakes and see where there is room for growth. For example, if you started a video series in 2013, perhaps in 2014 there is room to grow it further with different genres or perhaps utilizing other social media channels to amplify engagement around the video content.

3. See how your departments can work together on resolutions – Since marketing doesn’t operate alone, it’s important to put your heads together and see how each department can help in crafting next year’s goals. For example, the tech team may have some great ideas on how to make your website “work for you” better. Tap their minds and figure out what is achievable. It may surprise you!

To read my other 2 important must-have goals for 2014 around budgeting and thinking outside the marketing box, check out my full post on Marketing on the Rocks.

Contrary to popular opinion, creating and implementing a social media strategy for your business is not free. There are several things that your brand needs to consider and set up a budget for in order to have a consistent and loyal social media presence and following.

Here are 3 Things to Include in Your Brand’s Social Media Marketing Budget

Content Generation

Social media needs great content in order to do well and gain a loyal audience. You want your followers to be consistently excited for your tweets, posts, pins, snaps, and blog articles.

If you alone are not able to constantly produce this engaging and visually appealing content,you are going to need a person or people to help you write articles and edit them as well as create great video and beautiful graphics.

There could also be the need for stock imagery, or fun things like interactive visuals (through services like Thinglink or Stipple) to make your content more engaging.

Community Management

Social media is not about posting it and walking away. Channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, and others require constant moderation.

This moderation can include (but not limited to): comments, competitive listening, and what’s happening in real time so that your brand can take advantage and distribute the right content to your audience at the right time.

In short – this takes at minimum one dedicated person to do this every day (along with moderation tools which could have a monthly fee to help to somewhat streamline this process).

To read about the final item to include in your brand’s social media marketing budget, check out my full post on Startup Fashion!